Groupon Acquires Adku(e-Commerce Data Stealth Startup)

Groupon, the group deals giant has acquired Adku- a stealth startup founded by ex-Googlers based in San Francisco. Adku is backed by Greylock Partners, Battery Ventures and True Ventures. Adku was launched at the AngelPad Demo event in 2010.

Adku CEO Ajit Varma in a blog post to announce the acquisition stated “We started talking to Groupon to bring our technology to more customers and quickly realized that we wanted to be a deeper part of a company that people love and is empowering merchants and customers in a way that’s never been done before. We’re looking forward to joining forces with Groupon to have an impact on millions of users and to share in Groupon’s vision of reshaping local commerce”

Adku was working on real-time analysis of the vast data that’s being created every second on the web and building a machine learning prediction engine to optimize eCommerce.

Ajit Varma-Adku, co-founder previously worked at Google as the ad spam czar tasked with ensuring high quality ads. In his 6 years at Google, he was also the group product manager running search quality, search personalization and internal tools.

Carlos Whitt another co-f0under of Adku also spent 6 years at Google as Tech-Lead and Staff Software Engineer of several projects spanning mobile (Google Latitude), mobile local quality (Google Maps for Mobile local quality), and internal systems (GHR).

Jesse Shieh(co-founder) spent 5 years at Google where he was Tech-Lead of iGoogle. After iGoogle, Jesse spent a year and a half working as an Engineering Manager in Google Web Search.

Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed but the purchase price is rumored to be in the range of $10 million, according to TechCrunch.

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